Bent purchases
The best bents are carbon: GRE, Grey Owl, Wenonah, Werner and Zaveral, are ~$250 and nuanced, so better to wait a while.
Bending branches, FoxWorx, Grey Owl, Mitchell and Sawyer all make good wooden bents with glass over the blade. FoxWorx seems to have the best low priced units, but I’d go with whatever the local dealer stocks due to " Hey, I need a shorter one" issues. Ready exchange after a test long enough to tell.
Get a 12 dg bent. 20,00 marathon racers are not likely to be wrong. In a perfect world we want an ~18" by 8x5" blade with rounded tips.
Fit it by getting a good grasp on the top grip and invert the paddle in front of your body with the grip down, careful not to let the hand slip around the grip. For Bells, Mad Rivers and most Swifts the throat where shaft and blade meet should locate at the bridge of the nose. For Wenonah’s, Sawyers, Swift Keewaydins and other low seated boats use a shorter shaft locating the throat at the tip of the nose.
Remember, the stroke is shorter and close to the body, catch just in front of the knee, recover before the hip.
Put in some stick time before going carbon if bents are new, you’ll gave length, blade size and shape dialed in before dropping $500 for two.
The Mohawk is almost unusable; you’ll never develop paddle sensitivity with such a poorly shaped club.
A plug for AFS
Adirondack FreeStyle Symposium . How not to divorce your tandem partner.
www.freestylecanoeing.com
it comes with marriage counseling courtesy of CEW. But not by CEW. He is just the facilitator.
Quick followup
I had a chance to paddle with the new Foxworx Guide this weekend. It is a really nice paddle. I see the black mark on the shaft that is probably the offending blemish, but other than that, I sure can’t tell its a second. It feels nice on the water. J-strokes didn’t work very well, which I expected. Goon strokes and sweeps were fine. My seat-of-the-pants-o-meter indicates that it does, indeed, get the boat moving faster than my straight shaft paddles while hit n’ switching. I don’t know if that’s mainly attributable to the bent shaft, the nice wide blade, or my imagination. Or a combination of all three. But whatever it is, I love the paddle. Thanks again for the recommendo.